Easing patching of vRealize products with vRSLCM 2.0

Managing the patch installation on different products manually is a tedious job and more difficult when different products have their own instructions on applying the patch. Today Cloud Administrators monitor for the availability of vRealize Suite product patches and plan to install patch on different products when they are available and by logging into each product individually – Now consider someone gives notification about the availability of the product patches and also installs the different product patches from single pane of glass. Yes vRSLCM 2.0 does that and it handles the complete patch management of the products! Let’s see how this is done.

Prerequisite

Product patches should be available to vRSLCM, and it can be done either via Online or Offline options. When vRSLCM is connected online, user can sync the patch metadata to vRSLCM and use download option to download the patch automatically.

When vRSLCM is not connected online, user can download the product patch from MyVMware patch portal link offline and upload the product patch to vRSLCM.

Download Online Product Patch

vRSLCM will notify the users when the patch is available for the suite product and when it is connected online.

The Notifications ICON visible in the top right corner shows the list of available patches along with other notification such as product upgrades. Once user clicks the icon, it shows the list of notifications as follows,

The online patch refresh request status can be tracked in the Requests tab

Once the online patch refresh request is successful, the Product Patches section under Product Binaries page will list all the product patches meta data, and the download option will be available for each product patch which can be used to download the product patch to LCM.

Click the down arrow icon of the vRealize Operations Manager version 7.0.0 patch to begin the process of downloading patch media for vRealize Operations Manager 7.0.0 from VMware repository, and the patch download request status can be tracked in the Requests tab.

The download request will complete after a few moments (ordinarily this request time will vary depending on the amount of data to be downloaded.)

Once the patch download is successful, the download option will be changed to Downloaded icon and the delete option has provided to delete the downloaded patch from LCM to clean up the storage in case if it is not required.

Note: The patches shown in the below screen shot are for example purposes only.

Upload Offline Product Patch

User can download the product patches from the My VMware Patch portal link https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/patch and it can be used to upload the product patch to vRSLCM which is in offline mode as follows,.

In the Product Binaries page under Settings tab, click the UPLOAD PATCH button to upload the patch offline.

Use CLICK HERE button to select a downloaded patch file from local directory and then use UPLOAD button to upload a patch file.

The upload request will complete after a few moments (ordinarily this request time will vary depending on the amount of data to be uploaded and network latency.)

The product patches section will show all the patches which are uploaded by the user offline or downloaded using online option.

Note: The patches shown in the below screen shot are for example purposes only.

Install Product Patch

Once all the required patches are available to vRSLCM as mentioned in the previous section, user can proceed to install patch on the products. The patch install flow is similar for all the products. Hence we will have a quick walkthrough of vROps patch install below.

Note: It is recommended to take the product snapshot before triggering the patch installation.

Browse to the Manage Environments icon on the navigation pane

Click View Details for the Rainpole Dev environment

Note the version of vRealize Operations in the Rainpole Dev environment, Currently it is at the version 7.0.0, and Rainpole’s data center admins have decided to patch the vRealize Operations with HF1 patch (dummy patch for demo).

Click on the vertical ellipsis for vRealize Operations to see the available options

Click Patches and then click History

Note Patch Installation History is empty for selected product version

Now user can install the patch using the Install Patch option as follows,

Select the patch HF1 which is already downloaded/uploaded by the user in the Product Binaries tab.

The patch details can be reviewed before installing the patch,

Note the Patch request was submitted successfully message and proceed to track the patch install request.

The Patch Install request can be monitored from the Requests page.

vROPS Patch installation Request graph

Once the patch install is successful, status moves to completed.

The product card will be updated with the patch version once the patch install is successful.

The patch history of the product can be tracked using the History option present in the product card as follows,

The patch history of the environment can also be tracked using the View Patch History option present in the environment card as follows, which shows all the products patch history present in the environment.

The patch install flow is similar for all other products as well, when the patch is installed across all the products then the product cards will be having the patch details as follows,

vRSLCM Self Patching

vRSLCM also provides the option to manage the vRSLCM self-patches, where user can install vRSLCM patch on vRSLCM itself. It is recommended to take the snapshot of vRSLCM VA before installing the vRSLCM patch.

Browse to Update page in the Settings tab and use INSTALL PATCH option to install the vRSLCM patch.

User can use either online patch or use offline patch to install the patch.

Use UPLOAD option to upload the vRSLCM offline patch as follows,

Once the vRSLCM patch is uploaded, the patch will be listed in the patch list and user can select the specific patch to install the same.

User can review and install the vRSLCM patch as follows,

Once User clicks the Install button, it takes some time to get the message “Patch Installation request was submitted successfully…”

vRSLCM UI will be redirected to the maintenance window once the vRSLCM Patch Install is triggered, and the vRSLCM services will be restarted.

The System Information will be updated with patch details in vRSLCM settings tab after the successful patch installation.

User can refer to the patch install logs if there any are any issues in the patch installation, the patch install logs are present in the VA location /var/log/vlcm/patchcli.log

Troubleshooting

Product Patch is not getting listed in the patch install wizard when user tries to install the patch for the product.

Only the downloaded patches will be listed in the patch install wizard, hence though user refreshed the patch metadata online, user must download the patch using download option under Product Patches section.

The product patch history is getting cleared post the product upgrade.

The patch history for n-1 version will be cleaned up once the product is upgraded to n version as the old patches are not relevant.

vRLI patch information is not coming in the vRLI product card though the patch install is successful.

vRLI patch install is like the product upgrade where the version of the product itself will be changed (Example: vRLI product version will change from 4.7.0 to 4.7.1 once the product patch is applied) hence it is not mentioned as patch.

vRLI product patch history is not showing any patch details though the patch install is successful.

Since the vRLI product version is getting changed after the patch install, the patch history is not getting retained as per step2.

vRSLCM VA storage is getting filled up when there are many patches uploaded offline or downloaded online to the vRSLCM.

User can use the delete option under Product Patches section in the Product Binaries page to delete the patches which are already applied and are not required now.